How AI Can Improve Customer Experience

There is a multitude of publications in circulation, illustrating how AI can revolutionize societies. With the likes of driverless cars offering a reduction in congestion and accidents, and intelligent robots that can operate on human bodies to a standard higher than that of actual Physicians, there is little question that within the business realm, AI is expected to perform standard tasks in ways that are faster, smarter and more productive than ever before.

AI technology is still in the infancy stage! As a result, many of the alleged benefits have not yet come to fruition, and so its full potential has yet to materialize fully. However, one area in which AI is currently making a positive impact is within the field of enhancing the customer experience.

The examples are numerous:

• Smartphones – AI-powered personal assistants like Siri on the iPhone offer technology that can process a multitude of requests such as booking an airline flight seamlessly through speech recognition.
• Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa – Voice commands can manage your home and provide extensive entertainment options.
• E commerce websites such as Amazon and Alibaba – personalized recommendations get offered based on previous purchasing behavior and consumer trend analysis, enabling purchase suggestions before you even use the search option.
• Company chatbots – able to answer our questions instantly without us having to ring a customer support number and then wait in line for an operator to answer our enquiry.

Intelligent Supply Chain Management

These examples illustrate how AI can make the customer experience more convenient, which helps to increase the overall satisfaction and gain the loyalty of consumers. Another, and equally as important way, for companies to improve the customer experience, is by ensuring, on time, in full delivery. Whether you are a retailer, logistics provider, or manufacturer, you will significantly enhance customer satisfaction, and loyalty by getting your customers what they want when they want them. However, how can this be achieved?

The answer is to employ intelligent supply chain management software, powered by AI and ML, that significantly improves your company’s ability to ensure timely delivery. For example, Gravity Supply Chain Solutions provides supply chain management technology that includes an innovative feature known as “Risk Chain.” The function, which employs ML, analyzes over 40,000 external data sources, (such as weather feeds, port closures, and traffic congestion) to monitor and predict the impact of potential disruptions to your supply chain E.g., if a storm will delay a vessel which is carrying your cargo. With this information, your business can instantly react to mitigate the disruption, in this instance by choosing an alternate shipping route, thereby ensuring timely delivery and enhanced customer experience. To learn more about risk chain, read our blog: How To Overcome Nature’s Impact On Global Supply Chains.

Cognitive Enabled

The optimum supply chain is ‘cognitive enabled,’ meaning it uses AI and ML to make predictions, not only about disruptions, but also to predict what customers want even before they know they want them. Such predictions keep companies ahead of the curve and ensure they will never fall behind their customer’s demands. On top of such ‘predictive analytics,’ a cognitive supply chain will also be ‘prescriptive,’ by suggesting and even automatically making, supply chain optimizations on the fly, and continuously synchronizing supply in line with fluctuating market needs. Better still, these optimizations will continue to improve over time, as the AI keeps self-learning from its previous decisions.

Given the advantages that AI can provide, companies should start thinking about building a cognitive supply chain that is outward facing and consumer-centric. However, reaching the cognitive stage requires several intermediate steps; the most significant and impactful of which, is to digitize analog processes. To learn more, read our blog: How To Move From An Analog To A Digitized Supply Chain.

A Compelling Customer Experience Is Business Critical

It is essential to keep in mind, that offering a compelling customer experience is always good for business. A Gartner survey found that 64 percent of customers in the U.S. and E.U., claimed that experience was more important than price, while another study performed by Oracle, found that almost 90 percent of U.S. participants stopped engaging a company in any further business after they had experienced poor customer service.

Is your company ready to embrace, and utilize the endless potential of AI to enhance customer experience, and improve the overall strength of your business?

Contact us to schedule a demo of Gravity Supply Chain’s software, and to try out some of our impressive features, such as ‘Risk Chain’.